Going Beyond the Net Promoter Score

If your business revolves around the customer experience, you're going to need a way to measure the sentiment from customers. Without understanding how customers feel about you, it is difficult to make any significant changes to the way users interact with your brand.

While your business may offer the leading-edge in customer support, there is always room for improvement. NPS is a core metric for customer experience management. It allows for you to see from a customer's perspective what is working, and what isn't.

What is NPS?

You may have heard the term NPS thrown around, but what does it mean? The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure that is used by businesses to track how customers perceive your company.

So, why does NPS matter?

NPS is vital because it allows for you to understand where you stand with your customers. This measure is excellent for customer-centric brands. You can see recurring themes and track sentiments on how you can improve the customer experience.

By establishing this feedback loop, you will be able to build a better experience for the customer at any point of interaction with your business.

For example, if you have multiple comments such as “your user interface is complicated to navigate,” it might be time to make a change to that interface.

We’re not saying you have to, but there is an old saying “the customer is always right”...

How does NPS work?

The NPS survey is sent to customers in a specific time frame so that they can provide their input on their experience. The time frame differs business to business, but typically surveys are sent upon boarding, after a support ticket, and at the one year mark.

Customers are asked on a scale of 0-10 "How likely you are to recommend Bambora to a friend?”.

They are then placed in one of three groups: Promoters (score of 9-10), Passives (score of 7-8), and Detractors (score of 0-6).

The groups are exactly how they sound; Promoters are your biggest fans, Passives are, well, passive about your business, and Detractors aren’t happy.

The NPS is calculated by the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of Detractors. It can range anywhere from -100 to 100.

In addition to the score itself, the NPS also gives customers the opportunity to leave personal comments about your business, which may be more helpful than the actual numbers when it comes to shaping your roadmap.

How it hits the bottom line

Simply put, Detractors cost you more in the long run.

Promoters are six times more likely to forgive than Detractors, five times as likely to purchase new products, and twice as likely to recommend your company.

Making your customers happy is not just the right thing to do, it also costs you less.

The Bambora difference

At Bambora, we take the comments left by our customers to heart, analyzing each one and looking for common themes. Our company-wide goal for NPS gives us the opportunity to be transparent with any issues across all departments of the company.

NPS as a number, doesn’t mean much. One person’s seven is another person’s four. But when you connect that number to data, you unlock it’s true potential.

At Bambora, we tag our support cases with themes and then link the NPS of tickets back to these themes to create a Mekko Graph (which looks a little like a heat-map with specific categories). This allows us to see what problem areas are being affected the most. A green category means that things are good.

Areas that are dark red indicate a low NPS score, and means our customers are experiencing some difficulty in this category. This gives us an opportunity to dive deeper into where the real issue lies so we can improve.

In practice: If a category such as “Forgot Password” has a low NPS score on the Mekko Graph, we know we have to change something. Collaboration within departments is critical, and in this case, the Product and Support Departments would work together to find the real root of the problem.

It gives the Product team a chance to ask Support if customers forget their passwords all the time, is there a password reset email they aren't receiving, or is it their company login they are forgetting?

Using NPS to grow:

Understanding the needs of your customers is a never-ending process. You need always to be improving and fine-tuning your products and services to fit the voice of your customer. The happier your customers are, the more opportunities your business will have.

The goal here is to build the best customer experience possible, and you can’t do that without the help of your customers.

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